4 ms·

I worked for five years at a private university a few years ago, and my experience is similar, although to add a little: It never felt like a plan or conspirac

I worked for five years at a private university a few years ago, and my experience is similar, although to add a little: It never felt like a plan or conspiracy to make administration costs bigger. It's just very easy to do when you have more money coming in, year after year. In another economic environment, you'd get a "hard no" because the money isn't there. But when there is, expenditures become just another bargaining chip. Maybe you get your seventh librarian this year, and I get my fifth network guy next year. New buildings (as you stated) aren't as big of a contributor as expected due to the convoluted role of donations, grants, etc. But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years. And even then we were getting projections of our "debt capacity" and always riding that line, so it's debt on top of debt all the way down. I don't know about big schools, but for a smaller one like ours, there was no visible bad faith. These kind of things just happen when you can keep bringing in more and more money and so can your competitors.

supahfly_remix 7y ago
Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money diverted to administration?
- moduspol 7y ago
  I wasn't in a position to be explicitly told, although I did at one point see an anonymized list of faculty salaries and they did not seem unreasonable (only one in six figures). This school is about 40 minutes away from a city with an international airport. I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so. And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side. But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.
  - pirocks 7y ago
    On the case of California all the salaries of public employees aka. University of California employees are public, Googleable information.
  - klipt 7y ago
    > Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. My personal internet with Comcast is ~$60/month, so assuming universities have greater bargaining power due to scale that shouldn't make much of a dent in tuition. And my college email interface was clunky but I just set it up to forward everything to Gmail, which is free.
    - moduspol 7y ago
      It's not really reasonable to compare a residential ISP to one for a college campus. It probably is cheaper if you count only the Internet service itself, but everything between that ISP and each end user's device has significant fixed and maintenance / upgrade costs attached. Your residential ISP can give you an all-in-one modem / WiFI router and you're good to go.
Finnucane 7y ago
>But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years. Harvard got spectacularly burned by the genius planning of Larry Summers in that regard.
paulddraper 7y ago
> These kind of things just happen when you can keep bringing in more and more money and so can your competitors. Yep. If appetite and available funding grow year after year, even the most honest of colleges will have a hard time not expanding costs. Fortunately, it's still pretty easy to get a 4-year degree from a solid school for < $40,000 tuition not including scholarships. Pricy, but still far less than the $1m extra lifetime earnings.
- diablerouge 7y ago
  Hmmm, I'd beg to differ. I lived at home, with my parents, and went to a state school and paid in-state tuition. Found online PDFs of all my textbooks, and I'm still just barely scraping in at under 40,000. This is from 2016 to 2020 (finishing up my last few courses over the next 6 months.) And the administration is still considering (aka going to pass) an 11% tuition increase, after a 9% increase just 2 years ago. It's even worse for people who don't live near a university and need to live on campus, pay for meal plans, etc.
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    Note that I only mentioned that number for tuition. Rent, food, clothing, etc. will of course be more than that. $10,000/yr doesn't even clear the poverty line, college or otherwise. [1] My number might have been a bit low, but average in-state public college is $10k/yr for tuition and fees. [2] I went to college in Florida and Utah. Their top ranked public universities right now cost $6k/yr and $8k/yr respectively. [1] https://www.thebalance.com/federal-poverty-level-definition-guidelines-chart-3305843 https://www.thebalance.com/federal-poverty-level-definition-... [2] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/paying-for-college-infographic https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
ahi 7y ago
I work in academic IT. My job is mission critical to the existence of 3 other project manager jobs. The bureaucracy grows to meet the needs of the growing bureaucracy is not a joke.

supahfly_remix 7y ago

Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money diverted to administration?

moduspol 7y ago
I wasn't in a position to be explicitly told, although I did at one point see an anonymized list of faculty salaries and they did not seem unreasonable (only one in six figures). This school is about 40 minutes away from a city with an international airport. I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so. And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side. But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.
- pirocks 7y ago
  On the case of California all the salaries of public employees aka. University of California employees are public, Googleable information.
- klipt 7y ago
  > Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. My personal internet with Comcast is ~$60/month, so assuming universities have greater bargaining power due to scale that shouldn't make much of a dent in tuition. And my college email interface was clunky but I just set it up to forward everything to Gmail, which is free.
  - moduspol 7y ago
    It's not really reasonable to compare a residential ISP to one for a college campus. It probably is cheaper if you count only the Internet service itself, but everything between that ISP and each end user's device has significant fixed and maintenance / upgrade costs attached. Your residential ISP can give you an all-in-one modem / WiFI router and you're good to go.

Finnucane 7y ago

>But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years. Harvard got spectacularly burned by the genius planning of Larry Summers in that regard.

paulddraper 7y ago

> These kind of things just happen when you can keep bringing in more and more money and so can your competitors. Yep. If appetite and available funding grow year after year, even the most honest of colleges will have a hard time not expanding costs. Fortunately, it's still pretty easy to get a 4-year degree from a solid school for < $40,000 tuition not including scholarships. Pricy, but still far less than the $1m extra lifetime earnings.

diablerouge 7y ago
Hmmm, I'd beg to differ. I lived at home, with my parents, and went to a state school and paid in-state tuition. Found online PDFs of all my textbooks, and I'm still just barely scraping in at under 40,000. This is from 2016 to 2020 (finishing up my last few courses over the next 6 months.) And the administration is still considering (aka going to pass) an 11% tuition increase, after a 9% increase just 2 years ago. It's even worse for people who don't live near a university and need to live on campus, pay for meal plans, etc.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  Note that I only mentioned that number for tuition. Rent, food, clothing, etc. will of course be more than that. $10,000/yr doesn't even clear the poverty line, college or otherwise. [1] My number might have been a bit low, but average in-state public college is $10k/yr for tuition and fees. [2] I went to college in Florida and Utah. Their top ranked public universities right now cost $6k/yr and $8k/yr respectively. [1] https://www.thebalance.com/federal-poverty-level-definition-guidelines-chart-3305843 https://www.thebalance.com/federal-poverty-level-definition-... [2] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/paying-for-college-infographic https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...

ahi 7y ago

I work in academic IT. My job is mission critical to the existence of 3 other project manager jobs. The bureaucracy grows to meet the needs of the growing bureaucracy is not a joke.